


Wishing Stars

by electricshoebox



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Stargazing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-06
Updated: 2015-05-06
Packaged: 2018-03-29 06:27:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3885829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/electricshoebox/pseuds/electricshoebox
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dorian and Bull stargaze one night in the Hinterlands.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wishing Stars

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [星愿](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5101037) by [landanding](https://archiveofourown.org/users/landanding/pseuds/landanding)



> Just a little idea I've been tossing around for awhile. This is un-beta'd, so feel free to pass along corrections or critique. As always, a shout out to the Thirst Squad for the inspiration of their boundless enthusiasm.

“Do the Qunari have constellations?”

Dorian reclines on his elbows in the grass, the campfire at his back, his face to the stars. The moment he asks it he winces. It sounds impertinent even to his own ears. He hears Bull’s whetstone still behind him. 

“Where would we find the time to map the stars between conquests?”

Bull says it without heat, but there’s a rough edge that Dorian hears anyway, and he sighs, turning to glance over his shoulder. He can just make out the lines of the Bull’s horns in the firelight.

“I meant no offense. I suppose most cultures have them. Save dwarves, naturally.” 

The whetstone moves again. “Why do you ask?”

“Curious, that’s all. Broadening my cultural education, as it were. I thought you’d be proud. Josephine certainly would be.”

He’s rambling a little, and he knows it. The truth is, partly, that he simply wants to get the Bull talking, at least enough to fill the silence left between them when Sera bounced off to bed and Adaar drifted to his tent. The handful of Inquisition soldiers maintaining the camp have also retired or taken up watch, and seem to give both Dorian and the Iron Bull a wide berth without Adaar’s presence anyway. 

It isn’t that the silence is awkward. It _isn’t_. And the fact that it isn’t puts Dorian on edge. Either it means he and the Bull are growing comfortable together, growing so used to each other that they no longer really need to speak, or it means they have little to say to one another in the first place (or little that has a place outside the bedroom, anyway). He isn’t sure which would be worse, and that sets his fingers twitching in the grass.

He thinks back over the weeks and taps each finger on the ground to count them. Nine, no… ten weeks? No, closer to three months since he and the Bull started this ill-fated little venture of theirs. Maker, had it truly been a quarter-year of one-night-becomes-another?

 _Too long or too short_? some voice in his head asks. He frowns immediately at the thought and takes to plucking handfuls of grass from the ground.

He doesn’t hear the Bull set his axe aside and move until he’s dropping to the ground next to Dorian. Dorian doesn’t startle--thank the Maker for small miracles--but his throat feels suddenly dry. He watches the Bull arrange his legs in front of him, favoring the left a little as he eases back. Dorian eyes that leg and wonders at the story of it, wonders if he can ask, wonders if they’re there yet, wonders where _there_ is--

“Ataashi,” says Bull, pointing up at the sky. Dorian blinks at him for a moment, then slowly follows the line of Bull’s finger. 

“Ataashi,” Bull repeats, tracing a shape in the air. “It means ‘dragon.’ See it?”

Dorian leans back a little and tries to see the line Bull draws. After a moment, he smiles. “Ah, Draconis! Yes, we have that one.” He chuckles. “Though many scholars don’t see why. It seems superfluous when the Old Gods had their own dragon motifs.”

Bull hums an acknowledgement, lowering his hand. “Well, it makes sense for us. The rumor is Qunari share a connection with dragons, maybe even by blood.” 

“Well, it _would_ explain the horns,” says Dorian, quirking his lips. There’s a remark about “beasts” on the tip of his tongue like an old reflex, but he bites it back. An odd sort of peace is settling between them here, and it feels like an unkind way to chip at it, even if it _is_ setting his mind racing. 

Dorian shakes his head and lowers himself all the way to the ground. He spares a thought for Fereldan dirt getting in his hair, but sleep will muss it anyway, and his neck aches. So he lays back, looking over the stars until a shape catches his eye. He gasps.

“What?” says Bull. 

“It’s… Eluvia,” Dorian says. He lifts a hand as Bull had, tracing a criss-crossing pattern in the sky. “See? The top looks a bit like a cloud, with the arms outstretched like this…”

“I can’t see it,” Bull says, lifting his head a little.

Dorian huffs. “Look, see that bright one there?”

“Which one?”

“Right above us!” Dorian grumbles. “ _Kaffas_ , here.” 

Dorian sits up, stretching his hand out. A light curls around his fingers, curving and dancing, dipping into the Fade and then separating into little wisps. He guides them with his fingers to rise toward the sky, moving each until they hover in the right pattern.

“There, see?” Dorian glances over at Bull. 

His breath catches. The Bull is tense around magic even at the best of times, ever wary of the power. But this time a small smile spreads over Bull’s lips as he watches the wisps settle, and there’s a glint in his eye that isn’t just from their light. If Dorian didn’t know better, he might say the Bull looks…charmed.

He follows Bull’s eye to the wisps and wiggles his fingers just so. The wisps flicker, looking almost as if they’re twinkling. Dorian glances over in time to see the Bull’s smile widen, making Dorian smile in kind. Then Bull turns a little, sensing his gaze. Something frighteningly warm blossoms in Dorian’s chest as their eyes meet, and he turns away before he does something foolish, like _blush_. He lays back down in the grass instead, sighing.

“Eluvia was always my favorite,” he says, after a moment. “There’s some sort of legend with it in the south, I think. Something about a father sending his daughter into the sky to flee a jealous lover, or something equally dramatic.”

The Bull chuckles. “You know the whole story, don’t pretend you don’t, you sap.”

“I’ll have you know my taste in literature ranks far above the common romance drivel Orlesians favor,” Dorian says, huffing a little as he does.

“Right, because I’ve most certainly never caught you flipping through Varric’s novels,” laughs Bull, leaning up on his elbow to look at Dorian, mindful of his horns.

“Listen, _you_ try denying Cassandra anything while she’s armed and glaring at you,” Dorian says, and Bull just laughs again.

“All right, hide behind Cassandra if you like, I’ll keep your secret.”

Dorian has absolutely no explanation for why that promise makes his heart flutter. So he forges past the feeling valiantly and sputters, “As I was _saying_ , that’s the southern tale. In Tevinter, it’s supposed to have been dedicated to the Old God of mysteries. They say it grants wishes.”

Bull chuckles, saying something in reply, but Dorian doesn’t hear. A memory suddenly strikes him, strong and vivid, out of nowhere: Dorian, a boy of no more than seven, standing on the balcony off his chambers with his father kneeling beside him. His father points up at the night sky the way Dorian had for Bull, and little Dorian sees the pattern in the motions he makes, sees the picture emerge in the starlight, and he gasps. It seems like magic. 

“It’s very secret,” his father says, frowning with mock severity, “but they say, if you have a good heart, and you wish very, very hard, Eluvia may grant your deepest desire.” 

Dorian remembers gaping up at the constellation, then clasping his hands together and squeezing his eyes shut tight.

_I wish to become a great magister. I wish to make Father proud._

When his eyes pop back open, his father is watching him. He smiles.

“Dorian?”

Dorian blinks the memory away to find Bull leaning into view, brow furrowed. Dorian looks past him and sees the wisps have disappeared. His hands are clenched in the grass. 

He wished every night. He’d forgotten. Even long after his youth, on the nights he managed to drag himself home, or after that, when he paused his studies to gaze out Alexius’s windows. He wished long after his wishes changed shape. 

“Apologies,” Dorian says, easing his fingers free of the grass. “My mind...drifted.”

“You all right?” Bull asks, and Dorian has to swallow a little before answering.

“Fine. I…I used to be able to see it from my window back ho--ah, back north. Strange to see it here.” 

It shouldn’t surprise him, he thinks, that the stars in Ferelden look no different from the stars in Tevinter. It is not so very far, really, strangely, and star maps are old. They linger the way all Tevinter ruins do in the south--bones of a broken empire, unburied but unmourned. Yet Dorian feels as if he has journeyed leagues and leagues from the little boy making wishes in the dark. Nothing should look the same. 

Perhaps it figured: Dorian’s entire world shifts, and the stars remain unmoved. As always. 

“At any rate,” he clears his throat, “I’m far more interested in what the Qunari have mapped to the heavens.” 

Bull nods and lays back down with his horns a little above Dorian’s head now, bringing him closer. Silence stretches for a few moments. Then there’s a brush of fingers against the back of Dorian’s hand. A light touch, barely there, and before Dorian can decide what to think of it, it’s gone again.

“There’s Valo-kas,” Bull says, lifting his hand to point lower on the horizon. “It’s a sword, see? Well, that or a very erect dick. I’ve never been exactly sure.”

Dorian’s head snaps around to look at Bull, whose lips are twitching.

“You can’t possibly be serious,” Dorian says.

“What? We value virility _and_ battle skill, what’s strange about that?” 

But Bull can’t stop the laugh that bubbles up as Dorian swats his shoulder, shrieking, “Unbelievable!” 

Dorian falls back into the grass, but he’s grinning, watching the Bull’s whole body shake with the force of his laughter. He looks good when he smiles like that. Bull turns his head a little--as much as his horns allow--as he calms, his eye sliding to meet Dorian’s again. He looks… fond, and a little flushed, and unfairly attractive, and Dorian has to swallow as he turns to lay on his back again. He looks back up at the shape of Eluvia above him, staring. Then, almost before he realizes it, his eyes are drifting closed, and his fingers curl into the grass again.

_I wish…_


End file.
